


and all I've done for want of wit

by Kt_fairy



Category: The Terror (TV 2018), The Terror - Dan Simmons
Genre: Acceptance, Canon Compliant, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, do not copy to another site, referenced injury
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-03
Updated: 2020-05-03
Packaged: 2021-03-01 20:53:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23983360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kt_fairy/pseuds/Kt_fairy
Summary: Dying, James thinks, is supposed to feel as if you are slipping peacefully away rather than everything falling away around you. But then, that is what the living saw of it.
Relationships: Captain Francis Crozier/Commander James Fitzjames, Commander James Fitzjames & Lt Henry T. D. Le Vesconte
Comments: 14
Kudos: 54





	and all I've done for want of wit

**Author's Note:**

> *shouting from the quarterdeck* Thank you to MsKingBean89 for her boundless enthusiasm and effort. For forcing me to make sense, for keeping my head in the game, and for just like, _getting it_ man. The grog is on me!

Dying, James thinks, is supposed to feel as if you are slipping peacefully away, rather than everything falling away around you. But then, that is what the living saw of it.

He has noticed the slow decreasing of the world over the past days, rolling up towards him like a chart released from its weights. All existence has been little larger than a rocky patch of ground, or a boat, or a tent, for as long as James can remember, and now there is only the two of them. 

Francis is all there will ever be now, even though James can hardly see him. His eyes are so weak it is like squinting into close candlelight; the edges of Francis blurring into the darkness around him. The hand gripping his is warm and dry and holding on too tightly, but James does not mind - it is an easier pain to bear than the twisting spasms and clenching agony that wracked his body only moments before.

They are dulled now, soothed away by the hand stroking his throat. It is a comfort, even though it is killing him, to have Francis' gentle touch, to have his presence near. To have said to him everything he had wanted to say, things he never thought would be said aloud, and to have heard all Francis wished to whisper to him. All is done, he is known down to his bones, and so it does not frighten him to become nothing.

What might have been does not matter. James will not die with regret. Francis though, he will go on without James. For what they had almost been, and what they are, James tries to comfort him in return. He keeps his eyes on where he thinks Francis’ would be - wishing he could see their gentle shade of blue, any blue, one last time- and tries to be there with Francis so he will not be doing this alone, even when everything slips away like the water through his hands.

Everything faded until James was alone, and he found himself somewhere he knew yet could not place. It was recognisable and yet unknown, as if it was somewhere he had known in his childhood; every part of it familiar, yet he could say the reason why.

Then he felt a hesitant hand on his cheek, broad and rough and gentle, and the pressure of a kiss to his forehead. Before James could turn to Francis, hoping to give him one last word, one last reassurance, the touch became more sure, the hand softer. James found himself looking into a face that was like the smell of ink and ginger, and the feeling of taffeta against his palms.

“Oh my dear child,” came a voice that was as quiet as when James had last heard it almost a decade ago, half lost amongst the bubbling activity around the _Cornwallis'_ gangway. "My own dear boy."

"Ah -" James tried to breathe, choking when he found he could not.

"Calm, Jamie. Calm now,” his aunt Louisa soothed, pressing between his shoulder blades to encourage him to sit up.

He did not know what he expected to find when he looked down at himself, but there was no shining, immaculate, version of what was once James Fitzjames; the knee of his trousers was still ripped from where he had fallen, and his half unbuttoned shirt stained and filthy - the neat pintucking running down the front a reminder of his useless vanities. 

James reached for the hand on his face, closing his eyes against the fear and grief that welled up where his chest had been. “I left - I left them,” he gurgled around the liquid that was no longer in his throat, coughing and retching to clear it before whispering, “I left them.”

“Shh, now.”

“I left my men. I left - I left Fra… ” he found her glistening green eyes, clutching at the ruffles of her sleeve.

“I know,” her lyrical voice was clear now, as was her face, which looked younger, but not young; silver laced her soft black hair, and lines gathered around her expressive mouth. She looked as she had when James used to let Will chase him around and around and around her pale pink skirts, until they were dizzy and half sick with laughter.

“I have left _William_.”

“Yes,” she sighed, “and he will survive it. Even though I dearly wish that he should not have to.” 

“I was foolish,” James admitted, all his shortcomings gathering around him like relatives about a death bed. “I was selfish. I - I was -- I gave up.”

“Human failings are the fault of no man, and no man is ever truly wise,” she said, ever wise in her straightforward way. “When it counted you acted for the good of the many, and you faced your end with all your courage,” she looked over him, eyes glinting with emotion as she reached for the blood stain on his side. “Do not be ashamed now, when your last act was of selfless comfort for one whom you love.”

There was no cold to feel, but even here, now, in a place where no pain or fear was meant to touch him, he felt it.

“Auntie, I --”

“Now. I cared little for that business in life, and I _will not_ be held by such backward things here,” she said firmly, even as her fingers passed through his hair, as gentle as the breeze. “I am your _mother_ , James, and you have always been my son.”

He accepted it, thinking that the dead had little need to dish out empty words for comfort's sake. “Being there, for as long as I was able, was all I could do for them - for him,” he explained steadily, distantly aware that he should be crying. “I know he will carry it, even though death was a mercy that I asked for.”

“It will matter more than you know, on his road ahead.”

James nodded, glancing around as he tried to make sense of it all - of where he was, of being dead. Of being nothing at all, while still being everything that James Fitzjames had ever been. “It is all struggle and suffering, their future now. Death was… I do not know if I should hope for their road to be a long one or not.”

She nodded in understanding, moving to brush her cool lips against the place where he had first bled as she held his face in her hands. He was aware of the void where his twisting pain and exhaustion had been, and even though he could not weep, James wished he could; from relief as much as finally being released from the overwhelming fear of living.

“You are no longer suffering. And for that I am grateful. Yet, it breaks my heart to have you here, years younger than I was when I first held you - travel weary yet refusing to show it- in my arms,” she whispered, pulling him into an embrace so warm it made James shiver. “You were so full of courage even then. You have been so very brave,” she lay her hand on the back of his head as he began to shake. “My brave, brave boy.”

* ***** *

He came across Doctor Stanley somewhere lush and green with the smell of rain thick in the air; and where nervous, fleeting shadows that James could not see shifted around him like the beating of so many birds wings.

“I should have known all was not well with you,” James told him, finding that looking upon his charred features was not as terrifying a prospect as he had thought. “I took it for granted that you were bearing up - that we were all bearing up under it.”

“I knew what would happen,” said the personable man who had saved James’ life in China. Whose intelligent conversation had become short and dour as the numbers of wounded grew, and his aprons became soaked with blood. “I knew scurvy would be an impossible challenge when we walked out. When I became aware of the poison in the food, I knew it would cause men to lose their sanity and make survival almost impossible,” he admitted with the ease of someone who had picked over a thing enough times to face it. “I broke my oath as a doctor, not quite realising what afflictions I myself carried. The fault is not yours, Captain Fitzjames.”

“The welfare of my crew was my duty,” James protested, thinking that the frantic flapping of those bird's wings were becoming like the crackle of a fire.

“I believe the proverb is ‘ _medice, cure te ipsum_ ’,” Doctor Stanley indicated the burned clothes and the skin beneath that looked more like a great, shining scar than raw, scorched flesh. “I am no longer the burned wretch I was. I trust that I am healing myself.”

“For what comes next?”

“I am a man of science, lieutenant,” Stanley admitted with a slight tick of a smile. “I did not think even this awaited us.”

* ***** *

“There is a lack of clarity, and of vividness of feeling, certainly. But all in all, Captain, I do not find it to be so terrible a plane of existence in which to find oneself."

"It is certainly less shadowy than any Asphodel Meadow we might linger about in, yes."

Bridgens smiled kindly, shielding his shining eyes from the bright white sunshine that was reflecting off the smooth, glass-like waters around them. He had been full of fragile emotion the last time he had laid eyes on James, more affected by his impending death than James thought he had deserved. And now, in this new existence, James was glad to have the barrier of rank removed so that they might be called friends.

“It is kinder afterlife than that, yes” he said, glancing over at Mr Peglar who nodded in agreement. “We have met many old friends, and seen some comrades also. Mr Gibson being one of them. He - he expressed regrets, but moved on quickly.”

James nodded, considering how dying made answering to yourself matter more than answering to anyone else.

“We also met two of those men we left at Beechey,” Mr Peglar said with purposeful brightness. “Mr Torrington, and Private Braine.”

“Private Braine, good lord,” James murmured. “How do they fare?”

“They were not very pleased to see us,” Peglar sounded amused by whatever had passed between them all, and James felt rather out of step. He was no mournful spirit made restless with regrets, yet merriment was something he had not yet dug out of the tangle of what he had been; he had not thought that such a thing as joviality could follow so close on the heels of dying from half a dozen unpleasant things. But then Peglar and Bridgens were here together, and James was alone.

“I was wondering if you had come across any of the lieut - with lieutenants Fairholme and Gore.” Bridgens asked over the sound of a great gust of wind cracking loudly against the canvas sails of the ship that James thought he had once known. “Or if you have seen Mr Blanky?”

“Mr Blanky?” James frowned. “Mr _Blanky_ would be here?”

“His leg had become very bad,” Peglar explained with genuine solemnity. “He could not walk, and would not be pulled after you -” he cast his eyes to Bridgens.

“Mr Blanky went to draw the creature away from us,” Bridgens said delicately. “Not long after we parted ways with you.”

James nodded, looking up into the endless masts that made him so very homesick. “He was not a man for fading away from disease, no.”

He had thought that Blanky would be with Francis until they reached whatever end awaited them. To be frank, James had not truly countenanced the man _ever_ dying, and it had been heartening to know that in Francis and Thomas, those remaining - his crew and his friends - had two strong, experienced men to lead them out of it. And it had been a great comfort to him to know that Francis would not go on alone. 

It would have been a blow to Francis, a terrible blow, to lose them both, one before the other. James felt it as surely as that bloody bullet had, thumping into his chest. 

“Birds had been sighted,” Bridgens said with gentle reassurance, bringing his attention back to them, and James noticed Peglar’s hand steal into the steward’s own. “There was a sighting of the ice breaking up - at least that was what I heard, before… before we came here.” 

James nodded. He turned towards the bowsprit feeling lighter, as if they were moving fast over churning waters. Melting ice was hope, and that was as rare and precious as water in a desert. Hope kept men alive, and a break up meant the beginning of survival - that some men would live through this at least. That it would not have all been in vain. 

And yet deep, deep down, he knew hope was a fragile little thing, and that it was no match for the rocks and the unyielding ice that had smashed them all to pieces.

“Good. That is very good news. That is - “ he smiled at them, relief like a rush of cold water that stole the breath away. “Thank you.”

  
  


* ***** *

"No!"

There was a tug, like a rope across his chest hauling him backwards, and James felt the shape of its meaning at once.

He staggered, slipping on the ground like it was greased with the rain of an Indian monsoon. 

Henry was there, caught just before he had hit the ground, hanging limp in his harness. 

James did not indulge in the melodrama of grief and shock. Those things would do nothing to soften this. Nor make him any less small or powerless in the face of it - nothing but a boy watching a great, screaming Atlantic storm towering above a suddenly very, very small ship.

He placed his hands on Henry, feeling the holes in the gansey that had once been his, and willed away every shadow of his past griefs as he gently helped Henry to right himself. 

Henry swayed on his feet, rubbing at his chest, then raised his head just enough to look at James. He wore blue tinted snow goggles, one of the lenses cracked like an jagged scar, and James could see the thick dark bands of exhaustion that sat beneath his eyes and above the dull, weeping ice burns across his cheekbones.

He stared at James then looked about himself, down at the wet ground, then up at the saffron yellow sunset. He slipped the goggles off, fumbling with them slightly, blinking overly wide eyes at the hazy sky before looking back at James. 

“So. You are my choir of welcoming angels, eh?” he said with no real cheerfulness, voice scraping raggedly from his throat. 

“If I were to sing you might think it was hell," James said quietly, grasping Henry's shoulders when he smiled as if he was not sure how to.

"I should -" Henry began, then started to gasp and choke like James had done when he had first realised he could not breathe.

"Give it a moment," James passed a hand over his back."It will pass. It will pass."

Henry recovered himself, grasping at his chest as if he expected a hauling harness to be there.

"Have you seen Graham or Walter?"

"I have not."

Henry nodded, peering at the distantly forming, uncanny shape of Bombay that was surrounding them. 

"Are we in India?"

James did not think they were anywhere at all, but that would not comfort Henry's skittish agitation. "It changes, all of it vaguely familiar in one way or another."

Henry tried to take a step in the direction that they both knew would lead to the fetid harbour and the wide open ocean. His legs were unsteady, as if he was pulling a great weight still, and James stopped him, encouraging Henry to sit with him on the soft earth, the sea an indistinct presence just beyond their sight. 

"How are you here Dundy?” James still had a hold on him, fearing either one of them might unspool like the filthy wool of his jumper if James let him go. “Last news I heard, there was a chance of open water."

"No," Henry laughed, his voice no longer a rasp but wholly devoid of any of his usual lightness. "No. Only ice. Ice and rocks, and nothing else. Did Cro…" he cursed under his breath and looked away, clutching the delicate ice goggles hard enough that they should be crushed. 

"I am sorry I could not stay alive like I promised you," he said dully. "It was beyond both my skill and my fortitude."

"I made you promise that out of vain hope. As a comfort to myself as much as a thing to keep you going.” The prospect of getting out had always been slim, almost futile - for it was a miracle they were neither owed, nor deserved - but if a man gave up, then there would be no chance for him at all. And James had not been able to go to his own death if he had thought it might pull Henry along with him. "I should not have done so, the odds being what they were."

Henry shook his head, "I could not keep my word, nor bring words of comfort home to families. An - and I do not think anyone shall."

"At least we shall see them all again. And there is peace to be had here.” James loosened his grip on Henry, letting his hands fall to hold his wrists. 

Henry had dropped down dead without either a kind word or comfort, a thing that made James feel as if he would rip in two, but at least he had not lingered as James had. He hoped a quick end was laid out for them all, and that the last man standing would not be left to wander on alone. “You are free from it all now, Dundy. Calm yourself.”

“The men had no heart left. We were all so exhausted,” Henry rambled on in a quiet, disjointed manner, still refusing to look at James. “Half knew they were going to die, and they had no motivation beyond hauling. If they deviated from that, then they would never get going again. I could… I could not order them James. I am sorry.”

“I know how it was, and it’s all right. You did all that you could, I know it.” 

"Oh Christ," Henry’s legs were shaking now. "The captain isn't here, is he?"

"Francis? No, he isn’t,” James, a cold wind shivering through his thin linen shirt, even though there was no cold here to feel. “Henry?"

"Hickey staged a misdirection and took him,” Henry said in a great rush. “The men would not go to rescue him. Edward could not persuade them, and I would not, for we had one mutiny on our hands already. The attempt would have killed some, and the hauling was already doing that. We had to leave some behind… south. We had to go south. I am sorry, James. I am - I have failed you twice over."

"You have not,” James said at once. He was reeling like a ship in that same great Atlantic storm; terrorised by the thought of Francis caught by mutineers, and of the men left with no firm hand to lead them. 

Henry finally looked at him, the desolation of those rocky shores clear in his bone dry eyes. "I have. I know I have. We are dead, there is no need for comforting words, James."

"You did your best by the men, which is all you have ever done,” James reached for the front of the once white gansey and moved closer to Henry. “Francis would understand, as do I. You have never failed me. Not once." 

"I never thought that I should see you again,” Henry said so quietly it was as if he had hardly spoken. “Let alone hear a kind word from you."

There were many men here who James had thought he might never get the chance to speak to again, and whose presence were a great comfort. Yet the space where others should be had almost become a physical thing - one that was almost bear-like in proportions. For everyone that creature had killed was wholly absent from this place.

Those men led by Hickey and fear, and now it seemed, petty vengeance rather than any clear sense of surviving, could not have lived this long. Not unless they had started on one another like rats _._

The creature must have them, or they would be here. Francis would be here.

Something shifted inside of James, a rattling, empty thing, but cloying grief and anguish did not try to cling to him. All that he and Francis had wished to say to one another had been said well before his death; they had made their farewells as if they would never speak to the other again. They should have known that in the Arctic, to tempt Fate was to invite her to act. 

He had been gifted a rare thing, made all the clearer by how it’s absence had left Henry so distressingly troubled. James had been allowed to come to terms with himself and his death before he passed, and the price for it was that he would now have to make his peace with this; that all had been lost, even Francis, who would remain lost to him still.

"I am sorry that I was not there with you for any of this,” James whispered, touching his gaunt cheek. “Nothing would have changed, fate had us in her hands from the start, but I should have been there with you all the same. It is not your fault.”

He put his arm around Henry, leaning his cheek on the fraying gansey as Henry pressed his face into his shoulder.

  
  


* ***** *

“Now,” Robert Coningham said to him in his gentle voice, side stepping one of the large glistening puddles that always gathered on the winding cart tracks of Hertfordshire. "You are being very restrained about this. I know you are not one for demonstrative displays, however it would be no shame in this case.”

“What case?” 

James received a well known look from over the top sparkling silver spectacles. “Do not be evasive, James, it does your intelligence no favours.”

“I have nothing to be demonstrative about, father. She did not wish to see me, and that is that,” James shrugged, roughly swiping some long grasses. He had thrown himself at all the painful parts of himself to put Francis out of his mind, so could not be upset when they injured him. Even though, as his father said, being refused to be seen by the woman who had given birth to him might be allowed to cause James more hurt than it was. “Grandmama said she was a fool, and unworthy of me.”

“I am sure grandmama used stronger words than that.”

James smiled, then nodded when his father glanced at him. “She did.”

“As is her way.”

“Although, I understand the reasoning. I think. It is better to have no son at all, than to have sent one half the world away, forever.”

"I can see some of the wisdom in that," his father conceded. He paused to rest on his cane, a habit he had not lost even though he no longer ached and sickened as it had in life, and looked up at the trees.

James was not sure it was wisdom, but it was the sense he had made of it thanks to Sir James Gambier. Which was the least the man could do for one of his spawn, James supposed.

_“I could not have left you behind in Brazil,_ ” he had told James, who found that he felt no ill will to the fidgeting, uninspiring man. James had seen enough images of his grandfather, the Vice Admiral, and heard enough about him to see a sort of familiar resemblance between himself and Gambier, but that was all there was between them.

_“I brought you to England because you were my son, and I would not have you raised papist. However England, and my own failings, meant I could not keep you,_ ” he had straightened then, and became a man more worthy of the grand drawing room they stood in, bathed in the scent of the orange trees outside of the windows. _“I do not ask you to forgive me, for I do not think you lament being given up. But hope you will let me say how… glad I am that you found such success in the Navy.”_

For a man who had only known his son as an infant, that had been rather insightful. For no matter how much he had once resented being so carelessly flung upon the world, James found, as he and his father walked along the same peaceful lane as they had many a times before, that he had never regretted being given to this family. Not once.

“You know,” his father mused as they moved between the patches of earth that always became muddy and clogged after a rain shower, “as a wee boy, you always used to find a way to get into the dirt, and make your linen frocks horrible filthy.” He shook his head as he smiled up at James, “then you reached the age for trousers, and have been compelled to be unstoppable ever since.”

James snorted, turning to gaze up at the leafy boughs that cast a dappled shade as they rustled delicately in the breeze. Everything had gradually become more material, more substantial, over the uncertain stretch between now and the moment he had come to know that Francis would never be here. All around him had become less like a distant memory or a hazy dream, had become more tangible, though still uncanny, and James was trying to not dwell on how unfair that seemed.

“Be it to both my benefit and to my detriment," he muttered, looking to his father when he received a gentle smack on the chest.

“You always found your way home,” his father told him with a wag of a finger. “And your family always finds their way to you.”

* ***** *

The chess board was as James had left it on _Erebus_ ; a game abandoned half played when scurvy and the looming hardships of the walk out had become too much. 

The strength of that metaphor had not been lost on either James or Henry. They had looked at it, then at one another, and became slightly hysterical, their brittle laughter filling up the impossibly still great cabin.

Many came in and out, and the game of chess they had started while living became never ending in death. Neither James nor Henry were always present when the game was played, but it seemed to be a consensus that spread from those who had died on the ice to those who had not; the game would be a series of almost victories and almost defeats, and would not be allowed to end.

Edward Little was the last man from the expedition to arrive. Although he did not come to find his comrades for a while, having gone looking for his own resolutions first as he had found himself with no clear memory of his last days. Which, considering the peculiar, dragging scars upon his bone white face, may have been the Arctic’s last act of kindness. 

Afterwards, the men who had died on the search parties that ranged well into the 1850s came to beg for answers. And then, slowly, those they had known and loved came looking for them; bringing new grief and new resolutions, along with word of yet more new decades that were passing by unseen.

The true motion of time was marked by the year that those newly arrived gave for their demises. There was a sense of passage here, but it was either stretched out or snapped short. And sometimes it seemed uncanny, as if out of sequence all together. 

Everything occurred in fits and starts anyway. One existed in a place with shape and form, but between those times one went to somewhere indistinct and comforting, that James thought was was more like a sleep than anything else. He did not cease to exist, his thoughts remained, but neither was he present, sliding in and out and from one constructed place to the next with as much thought as he might have once given to passing between rooms. 

James remained in that between state more often than not after a while. It was the true restful peace that he had hoped death would be, and he had no wish to wander about in the afterlife; he had done enough of that while living. He might have the right to think that it had done him little good, being so restless with useless ambition, but he had come to know a sense of tranquillity before his end, and he could not regret that. 

Peglar and Bridgens were the first move on fully into that haven of rest, a few others following when they deemed it was their time. James had not said all that needed to be said, and had not neatly tucked away all the frayed parts of his life; he could not move on before William came to this place, nor did he wish to leave the crew again, and certainly not Henry. Who pointed to the pieces moved about on the chess board as if that was proof of just how long James would be away, calling him a _"damned year long bug-a-bed"_ as if he had never slept a morning away.

On this occasion, whenever that might be, James had thought to go to his mother. Yet upon rousing had, instead, found himself standing at the end of the wardroom passage on a dimly lit Erebus.

He had not misstepped before when awaking, but thought little of it; one might go into a room and forget why one had gone there. And besides, it was not as if there was anything to worry him in this place.

As James strode along the deck he became aware of the peculiar way _Erebus_ was moving - not with purposeful motion as if she were under way, nor rolling along with the waves as if she were at anchor, but rocking in a peculiar manner that put James in mind of being settled on a sandbank at low tide. 

He slid the door open without intention, wondering at the uncommonly watery light. His eyes slipped over to the chess board set beneath the cracked windows, as if that could tell him what was happening as surely as it seemed to tell Henry the passing of time, and…

And it felt as if everything around him was slipping away again, curling fast up like a rarely used sea chart. He felt twisting pain and sticky warmth and a sorrow so oppressive James felt as if he were drowning. 

Yet, he smiled.

“You -” he gasped, finding himself halfway across the cabin before he was aware of it. A hundred words, a million - every word he had ever spoken felt as if it was perched on the tip of his tongue, clogging his throat, clamouring in his chest. All that came out was a quiet, fearful, “what happened to your hand?”

“Lady Silence took it to save my life, such as it has ever been.” The voice was rasping with the dry cold, the English clumsily navigated, but the lilt, the lightness, the rolling vowels had not changed one bit.

He was sat on the benches beneath the windows, beside the chess board, and although he was an old man now, James somehow knew that he appeared younger than when he had passed. His hair had barely a trace of red left, nor did his beard, and his sealskin, Netsilik trousers were incongruous against that old white gansey which was far more threadbare now than the one Henry was clothed in.

“I did not find I missed it,” Francis told him, and the sensation of those lost fingers against his throat, the only real intimacy that they had ever shared, kept James from asking why. “ _James_ \--” he said in one warmth breath, making to say more, but James stumbled to kneel beside him, the deck ice cold through the rip in his trousers, and grasped Francis’ hand. 

“I was told that Hickey took you, but you had not come, and you did not come, and I thought the creature had you,” James gabbled disjointedly. “I did not think I should ever be near you again.”

“I lived a long life, as you told me to,” Francis said gently, leaning over to kiss his hair as if to soften a blow. “Then when I came here I had others to see before I could go to you. It was the way it had to be,” he fell silent, and so did James, who did not care if moments or years passed before Francis spoke again. “Le Vesconte told me how you often go away for a time, to rest,” Francis said softly, eyes trailing over James’ face again and again in a way that James was sure would make him fly apart. “So I came here to wait for you.”

“How long did I keep you?” James whispered, holding Francis’ hand to his chest as if it could pass right through him. 

“No longer than I kept you,” he said, frowning in thought as his gaze trailed away to the murky light outside of the windows, as if that held some sort of answer. “I think -,” he looked back to James, “- I think seventeen years.”

“ _Seventeen_ ,” James clenched Francis’ hand tightly in both of his. Time meant nothing to him now, but the enormity of that number tore through him, and left him prickling as if he were stood too close to a bright burning fire. And still, he could not cry. “That is too long a time, Francis. I am -- ”

“You have nothing to apologise to me for,” Francis said with sudden force, the shabby old man once again a fine captain as he took his hand from James’ grip to lay softly on his cheek. “And it does not matter, now you are here,” he whispered, a flush on his weather beaten face when James sat up on his knees to lay their foreheads together. 

It mattered. Every moment that James had existed up until now mattered, and he felt them like a thousand motes of dust glittering, suspended, in the sunlight. Like the great crest of a wave. Felt - by God, he had become sentimental in death, but he felt as if his heart might start beating again.

“It is no trial to be alone - it was no trial.” Francis spoke softly, “others came and went,” he nodded to the chess board. “And I had these gentlemen and ladies to keep me company.”

James glanced over the board, at the neatly placed pieces, and took Francis’ hand from his face. He lay a kiss over the bright blue veins that laced beneath the thin, pale skin of the back of his hand, then the centre of his scarred palm, before he moving to sit on the other side of the small table set beneath Erebus’ slanting windows. 

“We have become very quaint in death,” he explained, unable to keep the smile from his face and voice and whole insubstantial body as he looked at Francis. _Francis!_ He wanted to weep and cling and rage, but all he could do was smile. “We have, all of us, been playing chess. One big game that never ends.”

“I fear I play the game so poorly that I might cause it to end," Francis admitted with enough feeling for it to hold a double meaning, and James reached past the board for blunt end of his arm. “Even in a place such as this.”

“I will teach you.”

“A lifetime did not teach me otherwise.”

“We have lifetimes up on lifetimes, Francis. And I would be happy to sit here, with you, for all of them.”

  
  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Blame this on the million version of _The Parting Glass_ and _The Lark Ascending_ I listened to. And also _Order and Chaos_ , and _Old Churchyard_ by Lady Maisery.
> 
> Credit where credit is due to [ this meta post](https://longstoryshortikilledhim.tumblr.com/post/616035036391751680/today-im-not-talking-about-how-francis-crozier) about Francis losing his hand.  
> And yes, the Asphodel Meadow mention is a ref to [ this fic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23314519) that drop kicked my emotions off a cliff.
> 
> family is not just being related to someone by blood. Adopted families are your family *kick flips*


End file.
